Operator
Ladies and Gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star key followed by the 1 key on your touch-tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Our first question comes from Chris Danely from Citigroup.
Chris Danely, Citigroup
Thanks guys. Brian, in all sincerity, congratulations on a great year for yourself and the company. I guess the first question is on gross margins. Can you just talk about, I guess – it’s for Stacy – the trend in gross margins after Q-1, and, you know, embedded in that, do you think that the second half of 2015 gross margins can be equal to the second half of 2014 gross margins? For this year, assuming something close to normal, can we assume gross margins would be up in 2016 on an apple-to-apple basis?
Stacy Smith, Chief Financial Officer
Hi Chris, this is Stacy. Yeah, I am. I’ll just start this by saying I’m not going to forecast 2016 gross margins in January 15. We’ll probably talk about those in November, so you’re getting a little ahead of me. In terms of the, you know, what’s happening in the gross margin: it’s very consistent with what we talked about in the November investor meeting. To specifically answer your question, yes, I expect that the second half gross margins will be back above the midpoint – we forecasted 62% for the year, we are at 60% in Q-1 – I think the second half will be above that midpoint and the first half will be below, this is all that I told you in November.
The big drivers for us here are 14-nanometer: as 14-nanometer becomes a larger mix of our products, we are mixing up in terms of our costs , that is higher than normal in the beginning of the year and then it will come down and catch up to prior technologies by the time we get into the back half. We have some increase in startup costs, and then we’ll get some good news associated with getting back some of the impact associated with tablets, so we get back about half of the impact from 2014 into 2015.
In terms of whether that will match the back half of 2014, I’d say that the only thing that I’d point to is 2015 is a year where we have startup costs, so it’s going to be an overhang through the year and you know our cadence is kind of every other year, so probably adjusted for that, we’re going to be in the same kind of range.
Chris Danely, Citigroup
Great. Then for my follow-up, a question for Brian, just on the MCG business. So Brian, I guess we’re still losing a little more than $1 billion a quarter, but you said that those losses will go down, you know, any color you can provide on that? Anything you can give us in terms of your overall goals, or goals for the mobile business this year, either in units or profitability, or anything else there?
Brian Krzanich, Chief Executive Officer
Sure, Chris. So, what we said for 2015. So, if you remember, step back, in 2014 we said, look, we have to go out and establish a footprint here – we have to, you know, get ourselves known in this market, be considered a serious player, and get the developers attracted to – both the hardware and software developers interested in IA. So, we set a goal, a unit level goal, saying we knew we were serious and we bought parts that were not necessarily designed for this segment, and that’s where the BOM cost deltas came from.
For 2015, we feel like we’ve done a very nice job now of establishing ourselves. We are one of the top producers of silicon in this segment, and our goal right now is from a unit perspective. We think we can just grow roughly at what the market will grow for tablets. We don’t need to go out and necessarily outpace the market or anything like that for this year, from a growth perspective. Instead, we’re going to focus on two segments and that is one, as you just said, getting our cost profiles down, making it so that we’re much more cost effective, and then as a result, getting the loss out.
Stacy and I are committed to drive $800 million out of this business for 2015. We believe we have a solid plan to go do that. That’s based on a couple of things: One, part of this re-organization was to drive efficiency, to get the consistency across the platform, to be utilized, and to get the efficiency of people, of hardware, of software, of all of that. The other one is: as we move into the second half of this year especially, SoFIA, which we said was designed for this segment, has no BOM or difference. It really starts to ramp, and you saw we’ve already internally qualified our first SoFIA, the 3G version. We said the next version, the LTE version, would be in the first half of next year, and that will ramp through the year. So as those come in, they take a lot of that cost delta out – and that’s where we’re feeling fairly good about the $800 million.
The other place, you saw the Dell Venue 8 7000 is a great example. It won Best of Innovation at CES, and Best of Show at CES, and it’s a showing the thinnest tablet with real innovation at a $399 price, where people can start to make money in the tablet space a little bit, now again. So we think the combination of the right products plus real innovation like that will allow us to make real progress.
